Abstract Objective To explore the relationship between ambulatory physician electronic health record (EHR) use characteristics and proxies for physician efficiency. Materials and Methods A longitudinal cohort study was conducted to examine physician-month EHR use metadata in 413 US organizations between May 2019 and April 2022. A multi-model machine learning classifier was developed to predict physician efficiency. The main outcomes of the study were physician efficiency, measured as the proportion of same-day chart completion by specialty, and productivity, measured as daily patient visit volume, both segmented into quintiles. Results The study included 218 610 unique physicians with 5 193 385 physician-month observations from 413 organizations with an average chart completion efficiency of 72.9% and 10.8 visits per scheduled day. The primary ML analysis achieved an accuracy of 0.74 in classifying physician-months with high chart completion efficiency and highlighted associations with key features, such as inbox message turnaround time 1.5 days and after-hours documentation 25 min/scheduled day. A secondary analysis achieved an accuracy of 0.84 in classifying physician-months with high visit volumes, indicating that factors such as EHR time outside scheduled hours 4.1 min/visit and clinical review time 3.2 min/visit were associated with higher visit volumes. Discussion and Conclusion Implementing specific EHR use measures with distinct thresholds, such as inbox management and after-hours documentation, could help target interventions to enhance productivity, providing actionable insights to create balanced and efficient work environments that improve patient care and reduce EHR time.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.